Hall devices are sensors that respond to a magnetic field. They typically suffer from offset error: the offset error is a non-vanishing output signal at zero applied magnetic field. Hall effect devices consist of one or several Hall effect regions with supply terminals and signal terminals. The Hall effect takes place in the Hall effect regions where the Lorentz force of the magnetic field on the moving charge carriers gives rise to a Hall electric field. The moving charge carriers are supplied by an electric power source which is connected to the supply terminals. At the signal terminals the output signal of the Hall effect device can be tapped. All terminals are ohmic contacts which makes the Hall effect device a purely resistive device. Vertical Hall devices (VHall) mainly respond to a magnetic field parallel to the surface of a substrate used for the fabrication of the respective vertical Hall device.
A number of different designs of vertical Hall devices are known, yet many of them are not apt for the so-called spinning current or spinning voltage method (or achieve only poor offset-cancelling performance) and suffer from low magnetic sensitivity and large electric fields. Typically, several contacts are placed on the surface of the substrate in such a way that current can flow in semicircles between two supply contacts while a sense contact is placed between these supply contacts and taps the Hall voltage that is generated by the current diving underneath the sense contact.